29. François Bonvin, Beached Boat at Le Tréport
| Artist | François Bonvin, French, Paris 1817–Saint-Germain-en-Laye 1887 |
| Title, Date | Beached Boat at Le Tréport, 1854 |
| Medium | Pen and ink and watercolor on brownish paper |
| Dimensions | 12 9/16 × 8 7/16 in. (32 × 21.5 cm) |
| Inscriptions + Marks | Lower right: f. Bonvin 28 Août 54 / Tréport |
| Provenance | [Galerie Jacques Fischer, Paris, until 2010; to Weisberg]; Yvonne and Gabriel Weisberg, Minneapolis |
| Exhibition History | "Reflections on Reality: Drawings and Paintings from the Weisberg Collection," Mia, 2022–23 |
| Credit Line | Promised gift of Gabriel P. and Yvonne M.L. Weisberg, Minneapolis |
An unusually large number of artists left Paris for the provinces in 1854 because there were no Salon exhibitions that year. Government authorities decided to suspend the Salons to focus on preparations for the 1855 Exposition Universelle, which they saw as an opportunity to showcase the splendor and achievements of Napoleon III’s regime.1
François Bonvin headed for Normandy. The artist is primarily known for interior scenes and still-lifes, but when he traveled he made landscapes. This view of a boat at low tide is from a group of compositions done within a few days at Le Tréport, about twenty miles up the coast from Dieppe. Bonvin worked rapidly, recording the quality of light of each scene.
The romantic melancholy of this sketch suggests that the image may have had meaning for the artist beyond simply recording the scene before him. Could the stranded boat have functioned as a personal symbol? By providing the date of the drawing, August 28, 1854, Bonvin revealed his interest in the specific moment. It was not uncommon for realists to document the date they visited a certain area, a practice in line with their interest in exactitude.
It appears that Bonvin consciously produced this and other drawings as a series.2 To date, we know of three other watercolors of beached boats completed by him at Le Tréport in August 1854. There is one each at the Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 1) and Fondation Custodia, Paris (fig. 2),3 and another appeared at Galerie Terrades, Paris.4
The Normandy coast attracted other members of the realist group as well, including James McNeill Whistler.5 While a complete list of artists who visited Le Tréport has not been established, the number is so large that the town could be thought of as a seasonal artists’ colony. It proved an attractive base, since by the 1850s trains connected Le Tréport to the French cities of Rouen, Dieppe, and Le Havre.
GPW
Notes
Galerie Terrades, Tableaux, sculptures et dessins français 1700–1900 (Paris, 2007), no. 22. Napoleon III was emperor of France from 1852 to 1870. ↩︎
Lorenz Eitner, “The Open Window and the Storm-tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism,” The Art Bulletin 37, no. 4 (December 1955), pp. 281–90. ↩︎
Sale, Christie’s, New York, January 12, 2005, no. 600; [Galerie Antoine Laurentin, Paris]; purchased by Fondation Custodia, Paris, 2005. ↩︎
See note 1. ↩︎
Denys Sutton, Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), p. 105. Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography (New York: Truman Talley, 1988), p. 115. Well-known artists such as Winslow Homer or J. M. W. Turner, in his Eu and Tréport sketchbook (1845), and lesser-known artists such as Norbert Goeneutte or Albert Aublet used Le Tréport as a model in their works. In reference to Whistler, see the Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, Glasgow University Library, letter dated August 18, 1899, to Rosalind Birnie Philip, call no. MS Whistler P389, where Whistler notes: “Perhaps I may yet run back – and afterwards to Tréport – or the south.” We may assume that he went to Le Tréport then or earlier since Le Tréport is close to Pourville and Trouville, where we know he had been. ↩︎